In 1873, two American teachers, Abbie Ferguson and Anna Bliss, set out on a steamer from New York for the long journey to Cape Town. They had been hired as the joint founders and headmistresses of the Huguenot Seminary, a new girls’ school in Wellington. They settled in to the Boland Dutch-Afrikaans community – whose daughters were sent to Huguenot – easily, but found the diet trying. Writing to her family in Connecticut, Ferguson complained:

We live on mutton here. We have had beef here once since school commenced, but every other day mutton. We have roast mutton, mutton chops, mutton cutlets, mutton broth, mutton soup, and mutton frigadelle [sic], that is mutton chopped and mixed with bread crumbs and eggs and baked. You see we manage to get some variety…Still with so much fruit we do not mind the meat so much.

She and Bliss were amazed by the quality and variety of the Cape’s fruit, but Ferguson still longed for the steak and oysters of New England eating.

The most striking feature of this menu for contemporary readers is the predominance of meat, and particularly mutton. I’ll return to mutton and meat-eating (and the Seminary) in the future, but for now would like to consider, firstly, the significance of mutton in Cape cuisine, and, secondly, the Seminary pupils’ diet in the context of broader views on gender and food during the nineteenth century.

This was a diet closely linked to local produce. The Khoikhoi had kept fat-tailed sheep and traded these with European settlers since the seventeenth century. When the British took control of the Cape in 1806, there were about 1.5 million fat-tailed, non-woolled sheep in the colony. Merino sheep were introduced in the 1830s: there were 5 million sheep in 1855, 10 million in 1875, and 12 million in 1891.

Cattle stocks were lower and beef and cows’ milk more expensive as a result. The meat of choice in the Cape remained mutton: during the 1860 economic depression and drought people complained that ‘mutton was dear’. Travellers to the colony in the nineteenth century commented on the frequency with which they were served mutton at rural homesteads. Several commented on the toughness and fattiness of the meat, suggesting a link between the lack of sophistication of their meal and that of their hosts.

Beef was considerably more costly than mutton, and the pupils preferred the latter anyway. Dairy produce from cows was also prohibitively expensive: as in other households, the Seminary made its own vet (or sheep fat) by boiling the fat from sheep tails with a little salt, allowing the mixture to cool, and then shaping it into large cubes. The American teachers disliked vet and in 1874 bought a cow to supply milk – and by 1898, besides for a vegetable garden, a ‘large family of pigs’ and ‘200 fowls’, possessed ‘six or eight’ cows.

Eating mutton every day was not, then, unusual in the colony. The Seminary was a boarding school, and Ferguson and Bliss deliberately replicated the menus which their pupils would have had at home: at breakfast and supper, the girls drank tea and coffee, ate fruit, and, instead of butter, smeared sheep fat and moskonfyt on their bread; a typical lunch – the main meal of the day – consisted of soup, roasted, stewed, curried, or fried meat (usually mutton), three or four vegetables, rice, and pudding.

Their decision to fit into local eating customs rather than impose American habits was done partly to mitigate the effects of their pupils’ homesickness, but also because they believed this diet to be healthy. Both teachers noted how infrequently their pupils fell ill and their general strength and good health. I think most nutritionists – although concerned about the quantity of red meat and fat – would probably agree with Ferguson and Bliss. But – viewed in the context of international thinking on health and eating – this diet was deeply unusual for the period.

In Britain, most middle-class children and young women were fed a diet rich in bland carbohydrates, and very little else. Breakfast consisted mainly of porridge or bread and butter, and potatoes were served at all other meals. The novelist Compton Mackenzie remembered:

Nor did the diet my old nurse believed to be good for children encourage biliousness, bread and heavily watered milk alternating with porridge and heavily watered milk. Eggs were rigorously forbidden, and the top of one’s father’s or mother’s boiled egg in which we were indulged when we were with them exceeded in luxurious tastiness any caviar or pate de foie gras of the future. No jam was allowed except raspberry and currant, and that was spread so thinly that it seemed merely to add sweetish seeds to the bread.

While serving carbohydrates was cheaper than cooking protein and vegetables, this menu was also the product of Victorian thinking about fruit, vegetables and meat: vegetables were unwholesome unless well cooked, and fruit was ‘rather dangerous’ and only to be eaten occasionally, and particularly to relieve constipation. Meat also ‘disrupted’ delicate feminine digestive systems.

This was a view of food still strongly influenced by the ancient humoral system, which conceptualised the body as consisting of four ‘humours’ (blood, phlegm, and black and yellow bile) which needed to be kept in balance, and partly by diet. Some foods were believed to have particular influence over the humours: meat, spices, and highly-flavoured food for example, were supposed to ‘inflame’ the blood. The Victorians felt that easily ‘upset’ female bodies – and particularly young female bodies – should not be disturbed by too much meat and rich, flavourful food.

Of course, not all doctors and cooks advocated this, and not every Victorian family followed this advice. The Seminary’s pupils ate precisely the kind of food which some Victorian doctors deplored: it was meat- and fruit-heavy and characterised by spicy, tasty dishes. Huguenot’s menu – which met with the approval of the pupils’ parents – seems to indicate either that this thinking about food, gender, and health was limited to Britain, or that it was simply one diet promoted among many.

I think that this very brief analysis of Huguenot’s weekly menus demonstrates two things: firstly, the extent to which nineteenth-century diets were linked closely to local produce, and, secondly, that dietary fads were as much of a feature then as they are now.

S.E. Duff, ‘“Every Hope of a South African New Woman?”: From New Women to College Girls at the Huguenot Seminary and College, 1895-1910,’ in Girlhood: A Global History, eds. Jennifer Helgren and Colleen Vasconcellos (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2010).

Last week’s post on feasting, thanksgiving, and national identities made me think about inaugural dinners. In the United States they’ve become not only a statement on the kind of administration the new president hopes to usher in, but also a reflection of the country’s concerns and preoccupations at that moment. They’re a kind of culinary state of the nation address. In an excellent article on inaugural suppers, Andrew F. Smith describes Franklin Roosevelt’s decision to choose a menu in keeping with wartime austerity. His cook

offered an austere, ration-conscious ‘ladies’ lunch’ of cold chicken salad, rolls (no butter), cake (no frosting) and coffee (no sugar). To make matters worse, some of the chicken had spoiled and had to be thrown out. George Jessel, the luncheon’s toastmaster, posed the question, ‘How is it humanly possible to make chicken salad with so much celery and so little chicken?’

With a nod to his folksy appeal to American voters, Bill Clinton’s menu was described as a ‘cross between a state dinner at the White House and a traditional Arkansas Raccoon Supper’. Barak Obama’s menu deliberately paid homage to Abraham Lincoln, whose reputation as a conciliator Obama hoped to emulate, and in commemoration of the bicentenary of Lincoln’s birth. Presumably, though, Obama didn’t intend to replicate the shambles of Lincoln’s own inaugural dinner.

Lincoln’s inaugural committee had planned a lavish midnight buffet for the inaugural ball: terrapin stew, leg of veal, beef a l’anglais, foie gras, pate, cream candies, fruit ices, tarts, cakes and more. The venue was the Patent Office, which had two spacious halls for dancing and dining. The buffet was set out in a corridor where patent models were displayed. When the grand supper was announced, after several hours of dancing, the crowd rushed the table and people began grabbing, pushing and stuffing themselves shamelessly. In a matter of minutes, the sumptuous buffet was a shambles – as were several of the patent exhibits.

Oh dear. We know that Obama’s lunch went well, but I’m more interested in the fuss that it caused. The menu was printed in newspapers and generated huge amounts of discussion – the Guardian even usefully provided recipes for the lunch.

It opens with a stew of sea scallops, shrimp, lobster and black cod in a cream sauce, baked in a terrine covered with a puff pastry…. Following that, the 230 guests will be served a winter veg medley of asparagus, carrots, brussels sprouts and wax beans, and a ‘brace of American birds,’ duck and pheasant…. For dessert, they’ll have a quintessentially American flavour, a cinnamon apple sponge cake.

I imagine that branches of Waitrose in north London were sure to stock up on scallops, lobster, cod, duck, pheasant, and heirloom apples before being inundated by enthusiastic Guardianistas recreating the President’s first lunch. This menu, with its emphasis on simple, unprocessed food harking back to homely, ‘honest’ meals based on seasonal, ‘whole’ produce suggests a presidency aware of the country’s economic crisis, and committed to responding to the concerns of ‘ordinary’ Americans.

A very quick internet search has revealed very little about South African inaugural dinners. Considering that since 1994, presidential inaugurations here are imbued with an incredibly strong symbolism, it’s odd that the only menu I could find was for Jacob Zuma’s inauguration in 2008. I wasn’t in the country at the time, but I can’t remember much fuss about his choice of dinner – and the same goes for the inaugurations of Nelson Mandela and Thabo Mbeki.

So this is what Zuma served:

Canapés

Cucumber topped with smoked snoek pate and lemon caviar.

Entree

Dullstroom trout wrapped in lettuce, citrus segments, lemon aioli, and dill served with an avocado salsa.

Palate Cleanser

Prickly-pear and fresh-ginger sorbet,

Main Course

A trio of meats: Peppered beef fillet, lamb cutlet, chicken breast stuffed with Peppadew, served with African dumplings and a thyme and berry sauce, spinach and steamed root vegetables.

Dessert

Mini malva pudding served with a chocolate potjie filled with tropical fruit, accompanied by slices of milk tart, finished off with a berry compote.

Well, ho hum. Putting together a menu for an occasion such as this, where the chef has to cater for a variety of dietary requirements is always tricky. Here, the caterers have played safe: the only recognisably South African dishes on the menu – malva pudding, milk tart, and snoek pate – are guaranteed crowd pleasers, and they’ve emphasised South African produce – Dullstroom trout, avocadoes, prickly pear, and Peppadews – rather than South African cuisines. The dumplings and spinach hint at traditional African cooking, and there are gestures towards Cape cuisine in the snoek pate and puddings. Otherwise, this is a menu that could be found in any half-decent restaurant anywhere in the world.

Fyndraai Restaurant at Solms Delta

I wonder if this hesitancy to embrace South African cooking – and we have lots of it – is connected to the fact that we’ve only recently begun to see local cuisines popping up in good restaurants. In the Cape, ‘traditional’ cooking remains the preserve of restaurants like the Volkskombuis in Stellenbosch and Cass Abrahams’s De Waterblommetjie at the Castle (now sadly closed). I like these restaurants and they’re really good at what they do (or did), but their cooking is of a time: it’s the heavy, relatively simple cooking of guidebooks to the Cape, and old-fashioned recipe books on Cape delicacies. And until around about now, we’ve seen local cooking as an ‘experience’ had at these kinds of restaurants.

But things are changing: the amazing Marianna’s in Stanford, as well as Fyndraai Restaurant at Solms Delta and, to a lesser extent, Babylonstoren, know Cape cooking well, and incorporate it into the menus. Why, though, should we care? These are all relatively – and in the case of Babylonstoren, nose-bleedingly – expensive restaurants which only a tiny number of South Africans and tourists will ever visit. So, no, there’s no overwhelming moral imperative to cook Cape (or South African).

I think, though, that it’s worth thinking about how we used to cook as a guide for eating seasonally and locally. A knowledge of these cuisines draws our attention to what grows – and lives – most easily in the regions in which we live. It makes us think more closely about the connection between what we put on our plates, and the farmers who produce our food. In a sense, it helps us to reinsert ourselves into a food chain.

I have a long association with Canadian delicacies: I was once locked in a basement with a fellow South African and made to make poutine for a gathering of homesick Canadians. (In due course, I’ll claim Canadian citizenship on the grounds of this experience.) In fact, the only Thanksgiving dinner I’ve ever eaten was a Canadian Thanksgiving meal at the Maple Leaf pub in London. Although held on the second Monday of October and seen as more of a harvest festival than a celebration of the founding of a nation, it’s fairly similar to the American Thanksgiving: it features turkey, pumpkin pie, and contact sport, although ice hockey rather than American football.

My Canadian friends were surprised to hear that South Africans don’t have a similar celebration, and given that this country has never lacked for nationalist movements, this does seem a strange omission. Particularly during the 1930s, Afrikaner culture brokers invented an Afrikaner history and tradition – transforming the Great Trek into a defining moment in Afrikaner history, for example. Jan van Riebeeck described the first formal dinner held by Dutch East India Company (DEIC) officials in the Cape in 1652, and it strikes me as odd that this ‘first feast’ was not turned into an annual event, celebrating the arrival of European settlement in South Africa. C. Louis Leipoldt, a key figure in Afrikaner cultural politics during the 1930s, was certainly interested in the history of Cape cookery, publishing on the subject and assembling a vast collection of sources on colonial cuisine. (The collection is now held by the South African Library in Cape Town.) I’ll devote more space to Afrikaner nationalism and South African food and cooking in the future, but I think that this is a good moment to begin thinking about the absence of a South African thanksgiving.

In October 1652, nearly six months after landing in Table Bay, the employees of the DEIC stationed at the Cape held a farewell dinner for a group of visiting Company officials, and Jan van Riebeeck, the Company’s first commander at the Cape was at pains to describe the menu:

Everything on the table was produced at the Cape: the fowls were reared here, new green peas, spinach, chervil, pot-herbs, asparagus (a finger’s thickness) and lettuce as hard as cabbage and weighing at least 1¼ lbs each.

Van Riebeek didn’t go on to explain how these ingredients were prepared, but it’s reasonable to assume that his cook did his best to replicate the cooking of the Netherlands. Considering that these European settlers had eaten – and liked – hippopotamus and had had some contact with the indigenous population, it wouldn’t be unreasonable to expect them to include some more obviously African ingredients in their feast. However, this feast was more than a meal: its purpose exceeded simply providing a group of DEIC employees with dinner.

Jeffrey Pilcher describes the first – and considerably more elaborate – feast held by the Spanish in Mexico in 1538: ‘the food was strictly European. …tables loaded with salads, hams, roasted kid, marinated partridge, stuffed chickens, quail pies, torta real, and for the servants, a whole roasted oxen stuffed with chicken, quail, and doves.’ The occasion commemorated a peace treaty signed between the kings of Spain and France, and the feast celebrated this union of European power: it was a manifestation of Europe’s wealth and, in the views of the conquistadores, cultural superiority.

Similarly, the inclusion of local ingredients or aspects of Khoikhoi cuisine would have been seen to undermine the authority of European settlement in the Cape. Indeed, Van Riebeeck referred frequently to the apparent Khoikhoi enthusiasm for bread, and suggested that bread could be used in exchange for cattle. As in colonial Mexico where the Spanish attempted to replace maize tortillas with wheat bread, for the Dutch in the Cape, bread represented civilised European values. It was, in their view, inevitable that the Khoikhoi should like it.

In contrast, American Thanksgiving features a combination of European and North American ingredients, with an emphasis on the latter. The feast is supposed to commemorate a dinner in 1621 held by the Pilgrims to thank a group of Native Americans who gave them pumpkins and turkeys to ward off starvation over the course of a harsh winter. This almost certainly never occurred: Thanksgiving was an invention of the nineteenth century. Annual thanksgiving, harvest, and homecoming feasts had been a feature of life in the northeastern parts of the United States since the seventeenth century. These local celebrations became the national Thanksgiving largely as a result of the campaigning efforts of the novelist and magazine editor Sarah Josepha Hale (1788-1879), who had described a thanksgiving feast featuring Pilgrims and Native Americans in her novel Northwood (1827). From 1846 onwards, she used her wildly popular women’s magazines to popularise the idea of Thanksgiving as a ‘Great American Festival’. Realising its capacity to draw Americans together in the midst of the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln declared Thanksgiving a national holiday in 1863.

Jean Leon Gerome Ferris, 'The First Thanksgiving, 1621' (1919)

Thanksgiving’s enduring popularity is partly due to the fact that it celebrates a rather nebulous ‘Americanness’: it can be a festival celebrating American power, family values, multiculturalism, and egalitarianism. Its evolving menu is reflective of this: alongside turkey and pumpkin pie are dishes which originate from the American south, like pecan pie and sweet potatoes with marshmallows (yes, really), and green bean casserole, which is the product of the dominance of processed food in American cooking. It can be all things to most people – it’s also been declared a day of national mourning by some Native American groups.

I think that Afrikaner nationalism’s failure to create a similar thanksgiving festival stems from a variety of reasons, but chief among them is the fact that this was an exclusive nationalism which celebrated the triumph of Afrikaners over South Africa’s indigenous populations. A feast which included elements of African – or even Indian or Malay – cuisine would undermine this. Also, Afrikaner nationalism featured a strong streak of cultural insecurity, and tended to look to Europe for a guide to all things ‘civilised’. Nationalist cookery books provided recipes for vetkoek, boerewors, biltong and other delicacies, but within the context of a cuisine which grounded itself in European food traditions.

Further Reading

Texts quoted here:

Jeffrey M. Pilcher, ¡Que vivan los tamales! Food and the Making of Mexican Identity (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1998).

I’m Sarah Emily – that’s me about to eat an enormous breakfast – and welcome to my blog. I’m a South African historian who’s specialised in histories of childhood, food, and medicine.

This is not a food blog, but, rather, a blog about food – and, more specifically, about food, eating, and cooking. The world has enough recipes for red velvet cake floating around the internet. Here, I’m taking a closer look at the complex relationships between eating and identity; between cooking and politics; and between food and power.